The Cowboys' Week 1 loss reads ugly in the standings and uglier in the details: 28-20 to the Giants on Sunday night in New Jersey, and New York converted 9 of its 11 third downs. Nine of eleven. That is 81.8 percent, and it is the entire game in one line.
Brian Schottenheimer did not dress it up afterward. "We just didn't perform the way we're capable of playing," he told reporters, and then came the phrase every coach reaches for in mid-September: it's a long season. He's right. It is. It is also true that a defense which cannot get off the field on third down doesn't just lose a game, it loses the rest of the roster's evening. Every one of those conversions was a Dallas offense standing on the sideline with its helmet off, cooling down, waiting. You can't score from a bench.
What makes it sting in Dallas is that this was the showcase window. National television, division opener, the whole league watching. Instead the story belonged to the other sideline, where John Harbaugh walked off with a win in his Big Apple debut and called it "really special." Then his players did what winning teams in September always do and got a little mouthy about it, topping the weekend's list of postgame needling. Chirp away. They earned the mic.
checked the almanac: harbaugh's ravens made the playoffs in each of his first five seasons and won a super bowl in year five. the man has never once been confused about what a football team is supposed to look like in week 1.
What comes next is the part that actually matters. Third-down defense is the single noisiest number in a one-game sample, and 11 attempts is a thimble of evidence, not a verdict. But it's a tell about the mechanism rather than the luck: those weren't heaves and prayers, that was a Giants offense staying ahead of the sticks and cashing manageable distances. If Dallas cannot fix the early downs, the third downs will keep looking exactly like this.
What I'm watching in Week 2: whether Dallas gets New York into third-and-long at all, and whether Harbaugh's group can do this against a defense that game-planned for it. One night is a night. Two is a team.